Happiness

[dminoz]

Question: does happiness count for anything other than calculation of the likelihood of rebels appearing? Does it have any effect on any other variables?

I had the thought today that another way of approaching "happiness" might be to consider it as "stability" -- in which case you could argue that "Public executions" or "The Office of the Inquisition", insomuch as they intimidate a population and keep it in line, would make rebels less likely (up to a point, of course), and would therefore represent the stick in the 'carrot and stick' approach to population control. The other side of the coin from inns and hostels, but the end result is the same...

[Elvain]

Happiness influences tax income too

[Angryminer]

Does it?
Until today the tax-income was always "amount of actual population" * tax-factor when I calculated it in the game. Never more, never less.

Angryminer

[dminoz]

I was reading today that tax on indviduals, aka income tax, was very rare in medieval times -- the exception rather than the rule, used only in emergencies or, of course, to finance wars.

[Angryminer]

Free people didn't pay many taxes, that's right. But about everyone of them (95%) had to pay interests from a credit to their lord or they served on their lord's territory and gave him a part of their products.
Or they weren't free at all and had the bare right to stay alife when they worked hard enough and gave their lord everything they produced.
So in an average every working man produced a specific amount of naturals that can be measured in money. That is what we call taxes in KoH.

Angryminer

[dminoz]

Understood. To return to the happiness question -- even if it does affect tax income, it could still be interpreted as 'stability', and there could be other ways of achieving the same result -- i.e. not just keeping the populace drunk. For example, subsidizing the local nobles in their efforts to supress the Peasant's movements, or supressing a religious heresy. Same end result, surely? And according to what I've read recently, public executions and torture were very big crowd pleasers in those days.

And while I'm here, there's another variable I don't know if I agree with -- War Exhaustion. Surely in those days, the working class did as it was told, and fought when they were ordered to. Was there ever a successful popular uprising against a war? And there were some mighty long wars, and yet the populace just seemed to be resigned to their fate... what uprisings there were were sporadic, short-lived and quickly suppressed. It must have been a hard life being a peasant...

That is one area that the game mechanics have got right, with plundering being so common. Tactics in medieval times often involved killing and maiming as many of the enemies peasants as possible, so as to deprive the enemy of his resources.